Environmental activist Sean Devlin believes Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament is “one of the first big missteps of his time in power”.

“What’s he’s done now, he’s taken all the various camps that were angry with him—the climate movement and people fighting [against] the war—and he’s kind of united us under this prorogue issue,” Devlin, B.C. outreach organizer for Climate Action Network Canada, told the Straight by phone.

On December 4, ahead of the Copenhagen climate talks, Devlin and four others—including a 15-year-old—were arrested following a daylong sit-in at the office of North Vancouver Conservative MP Andrew Saxton. Devlin said the group was representing the organization Canada Climate Justice, rather than CAN Canada. The five were calling for science-based emissions targets, wanted Canada to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and also demanded Saxton participate in a town-hall meeting to explain his party’s position on climate change. Saxton never showed, but police did.

On January 5, Devlin said, the RCMP phoned and told him they were dropping all charges against the five, one day after the Straight put in an interview request through Saxton’s executive assistant John Buckham, to which Saxton did not respond.

Another one of the five, Laura Yates—a constituent of Saxton’s and a master’s student in environmental education and communications at Royal Roads University—said she is going to continue to press her concerns.

“The disparity between the rich and the poor right now already causes me great concern,” Yates said by phone. “I lived in Brazil for a year, and seeing the starvation that happens in places, the warring that happens in places”¦it’s sad and it’s heartbreaking to know that we here, in our place of privilege, are contributing to that. And we’re contributing to that, not in that we’re buying guns and sending ammunition, but simply by the way we live our lives.”

Devlin said that he worked for four months on the KYOTOplus initiative with CAN Canada and helped gather 160,000 signatures from Canadians. No Conservative MP would meet with the group in Ottawa, Devlin claimed.

“We were forced to submit this petition by sliding it through a mail slot in the back of Parliament,” he said.

Besides Devlin and Yates, the other activists arrested were Andrea MacDonald, Tim Garner, and a minor who cannot be named.